


Stopgap

by irrelevant



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Angst and Humor, John Sheppard's Issues, M/M, Real Men Don't Do Touchy-Feely
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-05
Updated: 2011-02-05
Packaged: 2017-10-15 10:01:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/159691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irrelevant/pseuds/irrelevant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Things change when you’re looking, when you’re not looking, and when you wouldn’t know where to look if someone turned you in the right direction and pointed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stopgap

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers through 5.20. Written ages ago for mcsmooch.

It starts after the bug thing. The second bug thing. Which is sort of good, because after the first would’ve been even weirder. What with making like a big blue snake and shedding all over the place, John’s had enough weird. He just wants to forget, wants to block out the remembered crawl of skin and organs into wrong, unnatural shapes, but he’s not sure he should. His memory is full of holes. Half the time he feels like he’s flying a twin-engine through fog and uncharted mountains on instruments only.

Ronon, Teyla, Elizabeth…random Marines…Beckett’s staff…most of Atlantis got the full iratus experience. What are the odds of Rodney missing out? John would have said decent—Rodney’s good at avoidance—but he just showed up uninvited and without explanation at John’s door. He only does that when he’s stressed or wants a favor, or both. There’s no lesser evil here.

It’s after 2230 and Rodney looks like twenty miles of bad road. John wants to tell him to get his ass to bed, but at this point he’s not sure of Rodney’s reaction. Rodney’s tells are off; he seems more embarrassed than pissy, his hands restless on the tablet he holds. He glances at John; the tablet; at John again, and says, “It’s good. To have you back, I mean. Well, not _back_ per se, but to have you being you, as opposed to not being you and—and that made absolutely no sense.”

John guesses that’s his cue to say something, but Rodney blurts, “I should go. You probably want to sleep and I have things. Simulations. Time sensitive simulations, so I’m just going to—” he jerks his thumb towards the door “—go.”

“Okay,” John says, because hey, bullet dodged. Or not. Rodney has the same look on his face he gets right before he does something that will probably get them both killed. He squares his shoulders and lifts his chin, dead man walking, and then he invades John’s personal space and wraps his arms around him.

John’s not slow on the uptake; if he was, he’d be dead. He’s also not used to being grabbed without copious amounts of pain involved. He remembers one or two women who counted grabbing as foreplay, but in his experience pain is more to the point. Only his habit of trusting Rodney to keep his ass intact keeps him from laying Rodney out.

“McKay?” he says. His arms stick awkwardly out on either side of Rodney’s back. “Okay?”

Rodney tightens his grip. His tablet digs into John’s spine. He sighs, warm breath gusting the side of John’s neck, and John adds grabbing to holding and comes up with, _Hugging me, huh_ , and, _this is thirty-one flavors of wrong_ just as Rodney lets go. He steps back and away, and John stops hyperventilating. He wants to tell Rodney that they really need not to do this again. Because if Rodney hadn’t backed off, John would have—

He would’ve stood there and taken it. Three weeks ago, John’s life expectancy was a big fat zip. If he’d been able to trust himself with his sidearm he’d have personally taken care of the problem. That his team refused to give up on him is why he’s still around. He’s going to return the favor, and if that means letting Teyla whip his ass five times a week instead of three, eating Ronon’s dust every morning without fail, and letting Rodney grab him whenever, that’s what he’ll do.

And maybe he’ll let Arcturus slide faster than he was planning on, reserving the right to give Rodney occasional hell. He’d’ve done that anyway, because it’s what John and Rodney do: give each other hell. And, apparently, hugs.

Rubbing his hand over the back of his neck, he tries for nonchalant. He might even make it. “So, uh—‘night?”

“Yes, right.” Rodney nods once, his expression a mix of wariness and hope. “I’ll just—” he cuts himself off. His mouth crooks, a cheap imitation of his usual smirk. “Goodnight, Sheppard.”

“Yeah.” John’s never been so glad to see the backside of anyone who wasn’t psychoanalyzing or shooting at him. He backs up until he hits the bed and flops down on his mattress. Atlantis is a distant susurration; soft, soporific. He’s not listening or thinking, just being.

An image pops into his head: the way he and Rodney must’ve looked—Rodney’s squeezed-shut eyes and reluctant hands, himself stiff and cringing—and his mouth twitches and silence goes away. He rolls over, shoving his face and laughter into the pillow. If getting hugged by Rodney McKay is the weirdest part of a month that included him turning into a bug, he needs to get a life.

Tomorrow he’ll see if Lorne was serious about setting up a chip and putt on the mainland. And while they’re over there, maybe he’ll ask Teyla’s friend Eletria if she’d like to take a walk.

\--

Months pass before the incident repeats itself, and then it happens just like it did the first time, aside from John not freaking out. Not much, anyway. There’s a third time and then a fourth, and after the fifth John stops freaking out at all. A buddy of his in Afghanistan, a lit major, would’ve said, “Familiarity breeds contempt.” John thinks he’s gone conveniently numb.

It’s not like Rodney’s MO is constant or even consistent. John almost wishes it was—that there was a calculable pattern he could build an algorithm around for extrapolatory purposes. John and Teyla and Rodney and Ronon go on saving the galaxy, sometimes the universe, always each other’s butts. Sometimes one of them, sometimes all of them almost die. Sometimes ‘one’ is John. Sometimes not.

Sometimes it’s John’s turn for almost and Rodney looks past him afterward, slides past without a backward glance. Sometimes it’s Teyla or Ronon sleeping in the infirmary when Rodney ambushes John and holds on.

He thinks he’s getting better at physical contact. He doesn’t freeze up anymore, and that has to be an improvement. If he was stupid enough to discuss this stuff with the base shrink, she’d be drawing smiley faces all over his file and saying, “And you know that I know that you don’t like liking the way that makes you feel.” Jesus.

The real billion dollar question is: why him? He can see why Rodney wouldn’t pick Ronon for hands-on comfort, but Teyla is a lot better looking than John, a billion times nicer, soft in all the right places, and he’s willing to bet she’d hold and hug and pat for as long as Rodney needed. She’d probably throw in some bantos therapy and a side of meditation, but Rodney already gets those twice a week. An extra session with the goddess of pain won’t kill him.

And then it occurs to John that maybe Rodney isn’t hugging just him. Maybe Rodney does the whole team, Keller and Dr. Z too. Maybe John is the last node on Rodney’s tactile circuit. He’s surprised how much he doesn’t like the thought. He likes even less that it bugs him, so he does what he’s always done with emotional crap: he ignores it. His subconscious retaliates with guerrilla tactics, laying low then springing images of Rodney snuggling Zelenka (ow, ow, _ow_ ) on him at the worst possible moments. When he’s in the shower. Or talking to a pretty alien or, worse, in a meeting with everyone on his McKay shortlist of hugs plus Carter. For once, ignorance does not equal bliss. He decides the best defense is a good offense. He asks.

Not Rodney. Even if he wanted to he couldn’t; there’s an unspoken moratorium on hug analysis, and besides, John would rather take on a hive ship by himself. So his primary source of intel is out of bounds. He goes for the most promising secondary. Teyla and Ronon are easy to read if you know what you’re looking for, and John does.

He tries sneaky first (“You guys know McKay’s got issues”), but he’s never been good at any kind of sneaky that doesn’t involve threat neutralization or stealthing up bogeys’ afterburners and blowing the bastards out of the sky. End result: a lot of blank stares and no viable data.

He tries a more direct approach next (“Ever notice how McKay gets all touchy-feely after we come in hot?”), and Teyla frowns and Ronon looks even blanker than before, then says, “What?”

“I do not understand,” says Teyla.

John says, “Doesn’t matter. Forget I said anything,” because he’s got his answer. He finishes eating in silence, his mood better than it’s been in weeks. Six days later, Atlantis flips out and goes into lockdown. John smashes windows and climbs towers and generally does his best to break his neck. Rodney breaks up with Katie Brown. John hears all about it from Teyla who heard it from Lorne, who had it from Parrish. John thinks: _Lorne?_ and then _Ow_ and frees up his evening. He already promised Rodney a beer. The situation has changed but beer is an equal opportunity drink. It works as well for commiseration as it does for celebration.

One day and nine hours after the city’s status is upgraded to fully operational, John’s chronometer reads 0143. He’s alone in his room on his bed with the lights out, reflected tide undulated dark across his ceiling. The beer is still in the cooler; there’s no Rodney, and absolutely no full-body contact.

He gives Rodney until 0200 then rolls onto his stomach, punches his pillow into shape and closes his eyes. The day he understands McKay is the day hell freezes over.

\--

In the Pegasus galaxy, time is a finite commodity. Climb out of one hole, take a step, fall down another. Shit happens because it can.

Scientists still don’t know better than to mess around with bonded nanites. The Athosians are still gone, and then so is Teyla. Todd’s still peddling his cryptic seer act (seriously, he should get paid), Michael is an unending pain in the ass, and Rodney—Rodney wraps time around himself and pulls John 48,000 years back from the future, then helps deliver Teyla’s kid in the middle of a firefight. He snaps and snarls and manages the impossible every other week, usually before breakfast.

He doesn’t touch John once.

Not that John wants him to. It’s just, after a few years you get used to things happening a certain way. When they stop happening—bam, no warning—it throws a guy off his stride. John kicked his hook to the curb months ago. Now he’s slicing like crazy.

It’s fine, though. He’s fine. No more wondering if it’s his night to get jumped. He’s getting more, better sleep than he has since the first time he walked through a Stargate. He’s fucking _perfect_. Until his team walks through a Stargate after a science team misses a routine check-in, then spends an hour on top of another Stargate, freezing their asses off. Even that would have been par for the course—John’s team gets all the bad breaks—but Rodney goes in sick and comes out sicker than any of them know. By the time they do, it’s too late.

It’s a kind of waking nightmare; John’s worst fear realized. The crystal entity from M3X-387 was only half right. John’s not just afraid of bringing trouble down on the people he cares about, he’s afraid that when he does he won’t be able to fix it. And here it is, his self-fulfilled prophecy, because he can’t get the thing inside McKay’s head out again.

This isn’t a threat he can neutralize, can’t shoot it or blow it up, can’t gate to the ass end of the galaxy and steal a miracle cure from a homicidal race of androids. There’s no chopper to fly behind enemy lines, and no way to talk Rodney into meditative trance or back to reality. This _is_ reality and John can’t do anything but watch Keller try and fail. By the time they’re standing in Ronon’s shrine John has, not made his peace with Rodney’s approaching death, but reached an armed truce with his own limits. Sometimes all you can do is deal.

John’s dealing. He’s dealing so well that if he has to listen to Rodney bitch one more second he’s going to shoot himself. Instead, he helps Keller cut Rodney’s head open. He has just enough time to be surprised by how small the organism is, then Ronon fires and there’s a grey smear on the ground. John looks at Keller’s gloved hands, Rodney’s blood a bright red contrast to surgical blue.

All the way back to the jumper, then to Atlantis, John doesn’t let himself think beyond the next subroutine. They stack up in front of him, everything he needs to do to get his people home safe, and he’s standing in the infirmary with his hand on Rodney’s leg, Rodney’s whining about food and Christ, everything is so damn normal and John’s just going to go throw up now.

Later, after he’s puked and showered and restored a few necessary electrolytes, he goes back. He stands beside Rodney’s bed and wraps his hand around Rodney’s wrist, as tight as he can get away with. Rodney frowns in his sleep, his arm twisting in John’s hold, “Knock it off, Jeanie.”

John uncurls his fingers one at a slow, careful time. He hovers his hand over the inside of Rodney’s wrist, thumb pad pressed barely in, blood rushing underneath, pulsing strong and steady. He cuts contact fast and goes looking for Keller before he can change his mind.

She’s in her office, head bent over a laptop. John raps lightly on the wall and she looks up at him, her smile blooming across tired features. There are new lines of exhaustion and fear at the corners of her eyes and mouth, maturation in a face he’s never been able to see as anything but too young. She’s beautiful.

“John?” she says, swiveling her chair towards him as he rounds the corner of her desk.

He holds out a hand and she takes it, lets him pull her to her feet and into the hug he isn’t going to give Rodney. She presses her forehead against his shoulder, he looks over the top of her head at the wall, and someone says, “Thank you.” John doesn’t know if it was him or her, but whatever. It works for both of them.

\--

For some reason, John expects things to be different after The Alien Organism that Almost Ate McKay’s Brain; maybe the way Rodney automatically turned to John when he couldn’t trust his own mind, like John had the right answers. Two weeks of Rodney looking to him before anyone else, coming to him for reassurance, John’s sanity draining out the seconds. Keller pulled a miracle out of a power drill and a modified scanner, and John thought—he’s not sure what he thought. He just assumed life would reset itself to right before Rodney spent several hours trapped in a botany lab. Sometimes he thinks it has. Split seconds, he looks at Rodney and sees four years of them, him and Rodney in seamless synchronization, and he thinks, Yeah, just like that.

He’s more relieved than anything else when Keller clears Rodney for duty. Normalcy is John, his team and a gate; that’s how John needs the universe to work, and it kind of does. Teyla’s made her peace with being both mother and soldier and Ronon seems almost content, his restlessness banked. They’re a cohesive unit; four interlocking pieces moving in smooth sync, Rodney integral to the whole. To John they feel closer, tighter than they’ve ever been. It takes Michael turning up like the eternal bad penny, and Rodney offering John his hand for John to realize it’s been four months since Rodney intentionally touched him. There’s still a yawning gap between then and now. Nothing’s changed.

From what John can see, it’s the same with Rodney and Keller. They dance around each other, moth to light, and John starts to think that in this timeline McKay and Keller aren’t meant to be. Then Rodney takes Earth leave, takes Keller with him to an event that almost kills both of them, and comes back to Atlantis lit up like a Christmas tree. He’s happy, more than John’s ever seen him, and finally, John gets it.

John was a temporary measure: Rodney’s way of dealing. Maybe the false alarm last year, being stuck in a lab without his radio, his laptop or anything else he depended on was Rodney’s wake-up call. Maybe he decided to cut ties with Brown and his insecurities as represented by John at the same time. Doesn’t matter. The reasons don’t matter because Rodney has Keller. At this point John’s beyond temporary; he’s superfluous.

Christmas tree, he reminds himself, and nods like he’s okay with Rodney blowing off their gaming night for the third time in a row because there’s a once-every-thousand-years comet he wants to show Keller. John’s not thinking about how last year it would have been him and Rodney and a quarter of the science department up on the highest tower in the west quadrant with Zelenka’s ultra-fancy telescope. He’s thinking about glowy Rodney (happy glowy, not ascended glowy), thinking that as long as Keller’s making Rodney look like that, superfluity isn’t so bad.

\--

The view is great. John isn’t lying about that.

His team is alive, Atlantis more or less in one piece. If they’d landed in the Arctic Ocean instead of San Francisco Bay the view would still be great. The only thing wrong with John’s picture is the way Rodney’s so far down it he practically needs his own frame.

He doesn’t get why Rodney has to stand all the way over there. Woolsey and Banks seem okay with the team vibe. Rodney and Keller could, you know, participate. It’s not like the rest of them have cooties. And yeah, John knows they’re having their happy couple moment, but come on, not the time or place.

Actually, he’s having a hard time imagining a right time or place. He’s not PDA enabled, and before now he’d have said the same thing of Rodney. He doesn’t understand the casual ease of Rodney’s arm around her shoulder. The slow hesitance of Rodney’s words makes no sense. Caustic doesn’t begin to cover Rodney’s personality; denigration is more his speed than affection, is sometimes his way of showing affection. It used to be. He’s changing, and John resents the hell out of that. He resents Keller, knows it’s not her fault, but she’s catalyst to Rodney’s metamorphosis, and John can’t wrap his head around any of it.

He wants to smack Rodney on the back of his stupid, genius head and make it be enough for both of them. He looks at the curve of Keller’s arm around Rodney’s waist, and he knows it won’t be. Rodney’s grown up, John hasn’t, and damn it, he’s not going to. He shouldn’t have to. There’s no reason to.

Except there is a reason, and it’s all Rodney’s fault. He started it. He took without asking, just Rodney being Rodney, and then he stopped taking and it turned out he’d given back as much as he’d gotten. Months, twelve of them and John’s starving. He can’t keep sitting around waiting, because _never happen_.

As John expects, Rodney and Keller leave first. Beckett trails after, and the rest of them clump together in the gate room, listening as Woolsey uses city-wide to issue mandatory downtime. The headaches of clean up and maintenance, of supplies and drained ZPMs, and the question of how long they’re going to stay here—here meaning both the Bay Area and Earth—can wait. For the senior staff, there’s several days of SGC and IOA meetings coming, no one’s idea of fun. John guesses they all deserve an evening off. They saved the Milky Way’s collective ass. Good enough.

He showers away layers of sweat and gritty fear, shaves off what for other guys would be two days’ worth of beard, then hangs out with Teyla and Kanaan and Torren for a while. He’d rather be in the gym with Ronon, but Ronon took off with Banks. John gets his butt kicked first by Kanaan then Teyla at the Athosian version of checkers, and drinks half a glass of potent Athosian wine. At 1954 Torren conks out. Teyla and Kanaan are showing signs of wanting to be alone, so John cups Teyla’s shoulders and touches his forehead to hers. She blinks at him, “John?” and he says, “Thanks,” because that pretty much covers everything.

The hard science labs are empty aside from a few diehards. Surprisingly, Rodney isn’t one of them. Radek raises his eyebrows at John’s question, tells him that Rodney closed down and cleared out two hours ago. Bad sign. He’s probably got a dinner date. John tries his quarters anyway.

He presses his ear to the door, but he can’t hear anything. He’s sure this is going to blow up in his face. He wonders if that’s what Rodney thought three years ago, standing outside John’s door. He thinks about walking away and he almost does, is halfway down the hall but, “Screw it,” he turns back around.

His ear piece is sitting on his bathroom counter. Waving his hand over the panel gets no response. He knocks and again, no answer. Knocks again, louder. Rodney yells, “What?” and acid indecision lets go of John’s gut. Annoyed Rodney is good. John can do annoyed Rodney, no problem.

“It’s Sheppard,” he yells back. There’s muffled swearing followed by stomping, and Rodney is standing in front of John, sleep-blurred and messy in a tee and sweats. I want, John thinks, and pushes past him.

Rodney’s busy yawning, he gives ground easily. “You’re a dead man, Sheppard.”

“Yeah?” John says. He’s wondering if he should just go for it like McKay always did, or give fair warning.

“My first shot at more than two consecutive hours of sleep in longer than I care to think about, and you wake me up? Do the math.”

John says, absently, “I’m good at math.” Rodney says, “I know,” and then John wraps a hand around Rodney’s forearm and Rodney’s mouth snaps shut on another yawn. He stands very still, looking at John’s hand on his arm. When he raises his head, wide-eyed panic mode is fully engaged. “Sheppard, what are you doing?” he says, sounding almost detached. Something really stupid, John thinks, and tugs Rodney towards him.

Rodney moves like a sleepwalker, his gaze steady on John’s face. He lets John pull him in, lets John rest his hands on his shoulders, and then he reaches up and his palms are warm and a little sweaty on John’s neck and cheek. His thumbs stroke the line of John’s jaw, which feels good and weird at the same time and John’s going to ask Rodney what’s up but before he can Rodney leans forward and presses his mouth to John’s.

Reaction time is delayed, because whoa, not what John was expecting. Rodney makes an impatient noise and licks John’s lower lip, and John thinks, Oh. Okay, because this makes sense. His hands gripping Rodney’s shoulders make sense. Rodney’s mouth makes a lot of sense, warm and insistent against John’s. He tilts his head slightly, correcting the angle so their mouths line up right, and for a microcosm of infinity everything’s perfect. Then Rodney’s hands are gone from John’s face, pushed down between them, and Rodney shoves hard.

John staggers back, pulling up before momentum slams him into the door. Sometimes he forgets how solid Rodney is. There’s plenty of muscle under the soft.

“Okay, you can go now,” Rodney says, his voice tight and uneven.

John says, “What?” They’re back to not making sense, and Rodney’s arms are crossed; his mouth is a crooked line of not happy.

“Joke’s over, ha ha. Go away.” It doesn’t compute any better the second time than it did the first.

“Did I miss something?”

Rodney’s expression goes from unhappy to blank in under a second. “You didn’t miss anything, Colonel. If we’re done, I’d like to go back to sleep.”

“No,” John says, “you can’t, and we’re not.” Yes he can and yes you are, John’s sense of self-preservation yells in his ear. He gave you an out. Hit the goddamned eject.

“I’m done,” Rodney snaps. “I’m not here for your entertainment.”

John’s patience hits the skids. “Damn it, Rodney, do I look like I’m having a good time?”

Rodney starts to say something then stops. He frowns at John. “Um. No?”

“Right. Because I’m not.” He just wants to know, “Why’d you stop?”

“What?”

Not buying it, McKay. “You kind of kissed me.”

Rodney looks away. “Yes, and I’m sorry. You have no idea.”

See, this is why he doesn’t do emotions. Because when he does he has to listen to himself say things like, “Look. I was just going to, you know, arms around? Because you don’t. Anymore.”

The room is just cool enough, life support working fine even after the beating it took today. Cold sweat drips down John’s spine to pool at his waist band; it slicks the bends of his elbows and under his arms. Rodney’s looking towards him but not at him, his head tilted, eyes focused beyond John like they always are while Rodney’s overactive brain processes at speeds unknown to the common cerebrum. John’s seen it before, he will again, has seen and sees the stalled jerk of Rodney’s body when Rodney blinks and focuses and says, “You’re an idiot. An idiot to the—no, you know what? There’s no precise exponentiation for your magnitude of idiocy.”

“You’re a genius,” John says. “You’ll come up with something.”

“Yes, yes I will.” There goes the chin. “And while I’m doing that, you’re going to go away because the genius thing works better without hovering cretins.”

“Never stopped you before.”

“Things change,” Rodney says. His chin hitches up another half inch.

“You don’t,” says John.

“Yes, well, previously you hadn’t just handed yourself to me on a platter.” And John should not be getting hard but he is, and Rodney knows. He has to know, his mouth is open and he looks drugged, pupils magnified inside thin rims of blue. “John.”

“What?” Thick and slurred and Christ he sounds stoned.

“ _John_ ,” again with his first name. Rodney only uses it when he needs John to understand the relative importance of a given concept. “I can’t make rational decisions like this,” his hand veers vaguely towards John. “I didn’t expect—God, why is everything a last minute suicide run with you?”

Sobriety hits John like twenty feet of December curl. Sometimes he’s as dumb as Rodney pretends he is. “Sorry.”

“Are you? I’m not.”

John shrugs—he’s said enough—and Rodney’s mouth tightens up again. He rolls his eyes, “Get lost, Sheppard,” and John holds his hands up in surrender, backs towards the doorway.

“I’m going. See me going?”

“Of course I see you. That’s the problem.”

“Gone,” but no, he’s not, and there’s this totally, awesomely bad idea, and Rodney’s going to kill him but what the hell: they’re sitting off the California coast. He’s wearing a uniform shirt, and he’s pretty sure—yep. Left his sunglasses in the right front pocket. He slides them out and on, and Rodney says, “Sheppard, what—?”

“I’ll be back,” John says, and wishes he had a camera because best Rodney face ever.

“Oh my God, you are so—”

He doesn’t find out what he is. He swipes his hand over the crystal panel and the rest of Rodney’s sentence gets lost in pneumatic swish. Something smacks into the door from the other side. Whatever it is sounds solid and John’s glad the door rather than his head was in the way.

Voices and footsteps echo up from down the hall, and John swallows his grin. Lorne walks by with one of the botany guys—Parrish?—“Evening, sir.”

“Evening.” John rocks back on his heels and Lorne gives him and his sunglasses a ‘What the fuck, sir?’ look, but keeps going. Behind John, Rodney’s door slides open again. Busted.

“Only you,” fingers gripping the back of John’s shirt, “would quote Schwarzenegger,” yanked and stumbling, falling into Rodney, “as a come on.”

Rodney pulls John’s aviators off, they clatter noisily against the floor, and John tries to protest, he really does. Those are his favorite shades and Rodney’s right: doing this now is as bad as John’s last idea.

“Idiot,” Rodney murmurs. His hand is warm on the back of John’s neck. He leans in, stubble scraped rough against John’s shaved cheek, his mouth fast-moving heat, just like the rest of him. He’s solid real against John and Jesus, he fits like nothing else.

John’s slower to move, slow to get that he gets to touch. He lifts a hand, wraps his fingers around the stretch of deltoids into triceps. He fits his angles to Rodney’s gradual topography, skims the dipped line of spine, in-out arcs of back and firm ass. Rodney spreads his hands over John’s lower back, finds and digs into rigid muscle and John groans and drops his forehead down on Rodney’s shoulder. Rodney says, “Okay,” like he just reached a decision. He says, “John?” makes it a question, and John lifts his head. His mouth grazes Rodney’s cheek, slip-slidden skin kissing back to Rodney’s mouth.

He likes that Rodney doesn’t stop talking to kiss. He likes feeling the shifting shape of Rodney’s lips against his skin. He says, “Yeah,” only answer he can think of, and Rodney’s smirk opens into a smile and John’s mouth opens up with it. Rodney's smug satisfaction slides into John with Rodney's tongue, John's hands brush bare skin under Rodney’s tee, the taste and feel of Rodney scary and comfortable and known, and John doesn’t understand how things he’s never had can be familiar.

But it’s Rodney, and John doesn’t need to understand Rodney to _get_ him. He thinks he’s always known that. He thinks he’ll save the freak out for later, when he'll have something concrete to freak out about.


End file.
